The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Some network devices, such as network switches, routers, edge devices and the like employ parallel packet processing in which multiple packet processing elements simultaneously and in parallel perform processing of different packets. In some such embodiments, the processing elements engage various external resources for performing certain processing operations on the packets. In such embodiments, it is important to efficiently utilize the packet processing elements and to minimize idle time of the packet processing elements.